I don't recognize the crisis. I will not live long enough to read all the really great stuff that was written BEFORE I WAS BORN. If modern writing is crap, I don't care very much. It's not the most obvious clue our culture is circling the drain.
I say this in all sincerity--take a look at the Notable Books lists of the American Library Association. I served on the Committee for a number of years. We read 100s of books and the 26 we choose each year are for sure bought by libraries. https://rusaupdate.org/awards/notable-books-list/
I see a parallel between the writer/twitter writer and the incisive comedian vs. the one liner king. Both are fine, but let’s not pretend the one liner guy has any intellectual heft.
It's rare a piece had resonated with me quite as much as this. It took nearly 11 years of scraping by paycheck to paycheck, flat broke in NYC, and getting fired from the YouTube content farm of a major legacy publisher most people only dream of working for before I could finally admit majoring in English lit was a mistake. Fuck them and fuck the whole system. You can just walk away and do something else with your life. The workplace will be less toxic and you'll get paid better too.
I really only regret not pulling the plug sooner. It's hard to admit you royally fucked up and threw a decade of your short life in the trash with absolutely nothing to show for it, but ignoring it won't make it go away.
As Freddie points out, writers have options beyond the media content farms. There's good money to be made copywriting and ghostwriting, and, in a way, it's more honest than working for Gawker or Buzzfeed. It lets me make a decent living without debasing myself kissing the backsides of media wankers I can't stand.
I make no such concessions. It was a mistake, full stop. I should have either been an engineer like my old man (and frankly, everyone spent my teen years trying to get me into the saddle) or an accountant like I am now.
The only value I gleaned from it was the wealth of literature and philosophy I was exposed to. That's not nothing, but it should have just been electives. There are far easier and better ways to make a buck. I've worked in construction for 5+ years now and the people here are actually a lot easier to get along with. People look at me like I'm crazy when I say the media was much more toxic workplace.
I did "do something else with my life," during the 2010s, but I regret that while "doing something else" I was on twitter daily for years, hoping that my Medium would get noticed if I shared the right post at the right time. Anyway, I related to what Freddie says here because he's talking about the appeal of the scene... to me, I'd say the sense of a scene made it easy for me to invest a lot of energy that I do think would have been better spent on exploring other career options and also on just hanging out. I thought I was working on a side hustle but I was actually just clinging to an online space where my English major felt more validated than it did in the material world.
Benny, the median age that people decide to become a librarian is 35. And most of us are English majors. I will gladly tell you more if you want to write to me direct.
And I am kind of old fashioned as I started as a librarian and still call myself that, but today's grads are calling themselves digital humanities now and academic library jobs are quite varied. I used to teach at a library school but now I teach at a "School of Information." You would be surprised. I would be rich beyond Jeff Bezos if I had $1.00 for every person who likes to write or read who said to me, "why didn't I think of this sooner?" (well, maybe a little exaggeration.)
There were cybrarians in hospitals circa 1994. I used one to find a cheaper surgical procedure, & incidentally got an incompetent surgeon dismissed by finding current procedures he wouldn't entertain.
I'd like to see the U.S. do what is done in Canada and the UK--the Public Lending Right where authors get payment for the circulation of their books in public libraries. That doesn't happen in the U.S. https://publiclendingright.ca/payments
> hoping that my Medium would get noticed if I shared the right post at the right time
This is Twitter right there. For 4 years of Trump, every journalist fantasized about posting That One Tweet that takes him down, and you can see the results.
I would have loved to get an English lit degree, or a degree in history, but I would have happily used them in my actual career, which was mostly product marketing.
How many great writers studied writing in college? How many great artists studied art in college?
Just had a flashback to Stuff White People Like. Back when the humor in white people criticizing other white people could come in a form like that... just deadpan and detailed descriptions of unusual behaviors that educated whites take for granted as "normal" in their friends, or in themselves.
How far white people criticizing other white people has declined by now... you had to sit down and actually intend to read a SWPL post, you couldn't just glance at it and see a trigger word and get the entire content of the post in 5 seconds. And SWPL posts actually used writing, as in, you know, descriptions of thoughts and actions in a sequence. It didn't just wink and nod at the audience and encourage us to go "Ah, you said a word that is clearly designed to be relatable to someone like me."
Anyway, even the weird internet niche of white people criticizing white people for being white people used to be so much better.
Well, I mean when Chappelle or someone like that made fun of white people, it was in the same way Gaffigan jokes about Hot Pockets. Whiteness was silly and kinda lame, but not the Big Bad.
Looking back at the SWPL posts, I don't think it dated very well or was very well written, I think the author struck gold but wasn't a very good miner. Still, I think FdB is a little off when he says:
"Stuff White People Like was an institution! Now lampooning other white people’s racial attitudes is like 90% of what college educated white people do, so there's nothing left to satirize."
The underlying gag on the site is 'American college educated middle class liberal culture is a thing and it's sometimes funny when you describe it neutrally like an anthropologist because people in that culture don't do a lot of self-reflection about it.' Really it's not making fun of 'white people' it's making fun of the people who in 2021 own copies of Anti-Racist Baby and use the term 'white people' a lot. That group includes lots of people who don't have white skin, though people who do are the majority. I think there is still plenty of room to satirize this culture, perhaps more than ever...
Yeah, I never thought of it as "criticizing" white people, it was lampooning a cultural niche (even if it was a very large and influential cultural niche).
For most for the last 20 years my workplace has been mostly Mexicans (at certain points I was the only non-Hispanic person), and it was only a few years ago we could all joke about, "Oh, that's what we'd expect white people to do," or, "Sounds like a Mexican people thing there" ("Why do Mexicans smell like fabric softener?" "I know, isn't it nice?" or "Why do white people get so excited about dishwashers? We use the dishwasher to store our Tupperware" or "Clearly Mexicans enjoy the Fourth of July more than white people do"). It was almost constant. But not anymore.
For a long time many of my employees (most, in fact, until recently) were LGBT. We didn't joke about that because for these people being LGBT was more or less like being left-handed, which doesn't provide a lot of opportunities for light-hearted kidding.
SWPL never clicked with me because, while it was cleverly written and the behaviors were keenly observed, they never felt like they described white people but simply everyone I knew who went to college, whether they were white or not. It described my friends or Asian or middle eastern descent as well as it nailed any white friends. Meanwhile there was very clearly a huge swath of working class flyover whites who would have scratched their heads at being told they loved Wes Anderson movies, aluminum water bottles and fixie bikes. The use of white to label a class and not an actual ethnicity always grated, and while it was lighthearted, I feel it was an influential step down the road to the stupid place we are today. For what it’s worth though, the site never aimed to be an enduring media institution, but was just the calling card of one savvy writer who used it as a launching pad to a successful TV comedy writing career.
“The use of white to label a class and not an actual ethnicity always grated, and while it was lighthearted, I feel it was an influential step down the road to the stupid place we are today.”
Yeah, I agree too. I remember one item in SWPL about apple-picking, and I had a “what do you mean WE, white man?” moment. I have always found apple-picking and similar activities to be completely stupid.
But I grew up in a working-class farm community where most kids I knew (including my brother and his friends) started picking vegetables at age 12 for much-needed cash—in other words, farm labor is labor, not fun, unless you’re Marie Antoinette dressing up as a shepherdess.
Googling that out of curiosity, it seems like his most recent work is as a writer and producer of the show Black-ish, which is certainly...something...
That was by design. The writer came to my college to give a talk (in hindsight I have no idea why) and he was pretty funny but at the end he said something that has resonated with me ever since: “You don’t have to be white to be white, you just have to be rich.”
That’s correct. There are at least 50 shades of white. There’s pigmentationally white, politically white, ideologically white, I hate you so you’re white, your group gets into too many colleges white, etc.
Weiss almost certainly made less in a flat dollar figure than Brooks, despite signing her contract like 20 years later, and typically for the Brookses and Friedmans and Krugmans there's some ancillary monetization, although I have no idea about the specifics. All in all I feel very confident in saying that Brooks simply has a far better deal than Weiss had, even though salaries are supposed to go up over time.
What’s surprising to me is that for someone who’s at the top of the pay pyramid for an industry - that’s not a lot of money when you compare it to a lot of other white collar professions.
MD specialist, big law lawyer, software developer, network security, financial analyst, financial adviser, management consultant, software sales, any kind of B2B sales, the list is pretty long.
“Can” make, not “typically” make. I work at a big tech company as a software engineer and very, very few make over 500k. 200s, 300s are more typical for mid-career people and a lot of people plateau there. At smaller companies, it’s much lower, you can look at salary surveys.
Not saying that’s not a lot of money either way, not saying it never happens (I’m not far from it this year), but reliable data says it is not typical.
Very true. I was thinking more folks in the top decile or quintile. And then you have RSUs and various bonuses and incentives and just general stock appreciation, etc. it’s rarely $500k in the form of $19,230.77 every two weeks (gross).
Yeah I mean to be fair you were comparing Brooks or even Weiss, who are both elites of some kind, not typical NYT reporters. And elite engineers do get that kind of money. But I was talking all-in, not just salary- salary rarely exceeds 200k below v high levels, the mid-career 200s and 300s are with RSUs and bonuses.
I tend to agree with the take that neither culture nor politics have meaningfully advanced after about 2009, only technology. So rather than “creating content,” we’re simply repackaging and cannibalizing the same material over and over, in ever more bite-sized and efficiently targeted chunks, with dramatically diminishing returns. The internet’s tendency to flatten everything towards a vast equilibrium seems to have largely overwhelmed its ability to inspire, at least in my particular milieu.
i just finished re-reading The Intellectuals and the Masses by John Carey, a good look at this phenomenon, the intellectuals' disdain for middle class culture.
As someone who was a part of what was both affectionately and pejoratively called "indie lit" for almost a decade, it's been both interesting and a massive bummer to see the same thing happen in small independent publishers of fiction. If anyone wants to know more about this, I have a lot to say about it!
But I do remember distinctly how small presses that felt essential began to collapse inward because the single person who was doing everything by themselves (editing, layout, publishing, logistics, royalties, etc) folded because after 6 years of making less than 20k per year publishing novels (and, honestly, most of these people really did this as a labor of love, making less than probably a thousand dollars per year doing it), they just gave up on this second job that never paid them in anything but facebook likes and twitter follows.
The ones that remained either got enormously lucky or had a lot of independent money (Maybe no one remembers Scott McClanahan anymore, but he was a rockstar in the small press world, and he may not have even been known at all had eccentric millionaire Giancarlo DiTrapano not enjoyed being publishing books most people wouldn't). But part of the collapse was that most of the darlings of the small press world who talked endlessly about the online writing community jumped ship to traditional publishing the moment they had a chance (which was definitely the right career decision for people like Roxane Gay, who would maybe still be writing traumatic short stories about rape and awkward romance had her nonfiction not hit so well with readers).
But, for me, the moment it began to die was when I noticed how most of the writers I knew didn't really write or read anymore. They mostly became aspiring political pundits.
I noticed the shift to aspiring pundits among people like me, aka people who majored in English and then graduated to having very well-maintained twitters and hoping to get a hipper job one day. I feel like it coincided with writing feeling more and more like gambling - if you're an unknown writer trying to break in, or a writer who's hit a plateau trying to rise, why not just lean into politics like everyone else? It's not unfun to write about, it's not uncreative, and it's not the most difficult topic to write a sentence about. It'll increase your odds of getting seen, so why not?
Yeah, I mean, I have no problem with that in general.
I think the reason it bothered me was partly because they were such bad pundits. Basically just rewriting whatever Chris Hayes or Rachel Maddow's latest hot take was. The other part was that it really did just seem like most of them stopped reading or writing books and were instead spending all day on facebook or twitter, posting literally dozens of times per day, if not hour.
And the biggest reason why this probably bothers me so much is that I knew these people and cared a whole lot about books.
Fulton edited the Small Press Review and also tried to annually identify all small press books. It was a huge national wonderful project. He died in 2011. COSMEP was the Committee on Small Press Editors and Publishers. Dust Books was the review of them. These were magazines (not zines) that were often done on printing presses. Here is a tribute to Fulton that gives an overview..and this was all by USPS... https://kawisniewski.com/2015/07/01/tribute-small-press-review/
I think many people would consider the presses I'm talking about to be "micropresses" now. I'm not sure they got captured by COSMEP, though they may have if the publishers wanted to be included.
I find a lot of independent publishing was really about how much money you had before you started. There's a lot of pay to play, unless you're already enmeshed in the university system. AWP was the big trade show we all went to and I know for a fact that it was almost never worth the expense for, like, 70% of publishers. But how much you paid for your table did have a big impact on how well you did at AWP.
The biggest success story out of indie lit is most definitely Two Dollar Radio, whose books regularly get coverage in all the big publications where it matters. Roxane Gay is probably the most successful of the individual writers, though Stephen Graham Jones is really hitting big these days. Matt Bell's most recent book is pushing him up beyond the limits of small press publishing too. A few others have seemed to make career transitions into Hollywood to varying degrees of success too.
I think a history of small presses/ micropresses would be fascinating. I think UC-Irvine has the back records of the small press review. And who will archive the more recent?
I do not want to drive everyone here crazy with data but the August 2021 report on public library use shows 2.2 billion items circulated in 2019. These national reports produced by the U.S. Institute of Museums & Library Services are compiled by each state submitting a report. There are lots of tables and here is a brief overview report in pdf: Characteristics of Public Libraries in the United States:
Whenever I see these soulless content farms, nü-Gawker and the like, pumping out standardized, assembly-line takes, my mind wanders to what those nerds over at OpenAI are working on. I see no reason even a modern AI, with a properly trained model, managed by someone who understands how to feed an AI contextual metadata, could not do most of the work of writing a Gawker essay on a topic.
You couldn't pull the human out of the loop quite yet. They'd still have to manage and prod the easily-distracted beast. Cut tangents short. Fill in prompts to poke and prod it in the desired direction. Sometimes take the reins, give it a sentence or two, then have it riff. Make sure it does not hew so closely to chunks of training data that it crosses into plagiarism. Right now, it's still a better business decision to make underpaid lit majors do the work. An AI-written nü-Gawker piece would be a gimmick, not a business plan. But there are no technical obstacles between us and prolefeed, only the fact that AI is still young and meat brains remain a cheap and plentiful resource.
"..Ask Jesse Singal the writer how much more Jesse Singal the podcaster makes." But Jesse Singal the podcaster wouldn't have an audience for the podcast if he hadn't been a good writer first and I think part of why the podcast is successful because it's a way to merge the voices of two good writers, plus their funny schtick about Katie being the boss.
The issue with media jobs is simple, but no one wants to absorb it. Paglia nailed it long ago with Vamps and Tramps.
There is no heat. Bc the truth is being denied.
You can't be edgy anymore with Yay trans! The heat is now sadly: Men aren't women.
You can't be edgy anymore with Trump Bad! The heat is now sadly: Trump was fine.
Rage Against the unVaxxed is freezing fucking cold.
And there will be no civil war, bc the red states and rural areas will shut down food and trucking for blue areas and the will be starved out in days. THIS IS REALITY. Media has to ACCEPT REALITY. Underlying all this is force. Is brawn. is property rights. Is talent. Is biology. In the mind / body duality, the body wins.
We have to get back to feeble wonkie beta cucks feeling bad about themselves, while men kick sand in their faces for media to really work. Bc REALITY cannot be denied.
Media cannot alter reality, It can only hold a mirror up to it. Media right now continues to be a marxist distorted mirror, so like ALL MARXISM is fails to feed as many as it could.
Sci-fi has been shit for years, bc the hero's libertarian man against society frame isn't there to woo the boys who need to read it.
Look folks, men aren't women and Trump was fine SHOULD NOT BE HEAT, it's obvious and common. It is the REALITY we are all born into like chains. The academic effort to invert reality is a failure. Hunter Thompson worked bc even while he raged at Nixon, he did so surrounded by guns, drugs, roaring engines, and explosions.
USA#1!!! is REQUIRED as a baseline to invite Department Store sized audiences.
Heat is masculine. There is nothing toxic in it. Fat women aren't healthy and beautiful. Its hard to work out every day and not stuff your head with twinkies.
And Paglia was right, Apollonian art signifies an ascending culture and Dionysian art is proof you are dying.
Freddie - I'd like to see a piece on Don't Look Up winning, bc it failed to actually be about Climate Change. It's a hilarious dark comedy and the formula is simple. Trump voters all love it.
Red and rural areas won’t shut down trucking because 1) money and 2) nobody cares that much. This is why American politics is so ridiculous, why the raging fights are about obscure things that don’t matter to actual life: life isn’t that bad for most Americans. I guess that means we’re fat and happy Romans?
The civil war fantasies are bizarre. If the thought is even worth entertaining (which it probably isn't), a US civil war would probably involve other countries joining one the sides. It would probably end up like the Syrian Civil war with several factions that each have international backing. That or both sides would just immediately nuke each other until only Alaska and Hawaii remain.
REALITY is one team has 500M guns, total loyalty of cops and soldiers... the other is your team
This is what Im talking about.
YOU as a person, the left, and "media" in general is BETTER OFF when you Fear & Loathe.
YES, you are trapped in here with a nation of boo-rah used car salesmen, YES, you have something to rage against.
The mental denial of Property rights = force and the "govt" is always really on the side of the value creators (think top half of population in each of the many states) just leads to "artists" having nothing to be rebel against.
Victims do not make the rules. QED.
If you are screaming you are oppressed, you are by definition NOT IN CHARGE.
If you mentally lash out at this and insist your team can win a land war with when the other team fills the military and acquires weaponry as insurance to make sure you are NEVER IN CHARGE, all you are doing is losing the ability to MAKE ART.
I hope this sinks in: REALITY is you are weaker visiting team and thats NEVER going to change. Nature is short and brutish. Violence and force underlies everything and you are terrible at those. MLK, Chomsky, Gandhi preach peace bc they get slaughtered iff they take up arms.
What does change is whether you admit it. If you admit it, you can make art! If you deny it, you can only make marxist propaganda. These are not the same thing. Che t-shirts doesn't pay as well.
Media can only be the mirror. If it distorts reality, less people use the mirror. Thats it.
There is no fight. Reality is no fighting happens bc one side wins.
My entire point here is that MEDIA THATS ADMITS THIS FACT, creates the room for art
Media that pretends there are enough tough leftists who do violence well.... which is a naive lie, makes art all but impossible.
Chomsky warning the left, don't act tough, they want us to act tough , bc it justifies their use of violence to end us is unblinking truth.
And no Texas gun shooting lefty asserts anything other than Chomsky.
Art needs to feel oppressed. Media needs to transmit the oppression honestly. The oppression is real. Talent and money (yesterday's talent) is always in charge. See Texas.
I like writers. But writers are never in charge. They eat better when they know it.
"You" = the avg Freddie reader (who still skew left)
If it helps, we're about to redo the 1980s.
Trump = Nixon
Biden = Carter
DeSantis = Reagan (young voters are all learning again, just like Boomers, WHY you don't let Carter be POTUS)
CA, IL, NY have lost.
TX and FL have won.
I want "you" to not feel "bad" about this reality.
The artsy crowd is supposed to be outside looking in. Bc the "home team" can still enjoy art! They don't mind being critiqued/criticized - part of being a man is admitting the bad about the reality you enforce.
There are only tradeoffs in reality. Art doesn't understand tradeoffs. BUT media must understand and admit them.
Everything was downhill for media types when they decided to stop just reporting "both sides" - bc they lost half their readers, and were no longer "enforcing" reality artists rebel against.
In the last American civil war the losers were on the rural agricultural side, not the industrial side, but they thought the same thing as you going in.
JFC. Just stop. The beat cuck writer crowd will be BROKEN IN HALF, thats why there will be no civil war. 500M guns + cops and soldiers = vote trump. Please stop, I'm trying to HELP "YOU" MAKE MONEY.
Denying reality doesn't make valuable media.
Valuable media doesn't talk about justice or what what ought to be, it talks about WHAT IS - it is unflinching in stating both sides.
Art can complain and make bank.
Media to make the most it can make, must be "objective" in the grand old way that leftists hate.
I went to a small liberal arts college in 2002, majoring in English lit. I wanted to be a journalist, but we didn't have a journalism major. And I didn't just want to be any journalist - I wanted to be an editorial writer for the New York Times.
But after one journalism class, and seeing how many accident stories and crime stories I would have to slog through in an attempt to "make it," I decided that wasn't for me. I had about the same chances of playing pro football as I did at being a nationally-known journalist.
I started a blog in 2003 because I loved to write. I still do. But I never expected my blogging to turn into a paid career.
I think most people on Substack, if they make anything at all, make money like the average person on Etsy: just a little bit extra to have fun with.
The lie behind the "long tail" was that things on the long tail actually make enough money to be financially successful. Most do not.
But there will always be people writing for the love of it, like the passionate editors of Wikipedia to whom Google, Apple, etc have outsourced the work of defining what is true and what is false.
Now I work for an online college. The closest I get to writing professionally is revising grants or editing courses. And I'm fine with that.
I think articles like this one serve as a good reality check for people who still think journalism is a smart career choice. But are there really many people like that left? The writing was already on the wall back in the early 2000s.
You are right abt Wikipedia. It's place where you can do much good and use these skills and maybe correct facts. I was surprised when someone used an "Alexa" in my presence and the device said,"According to Wikipedia....." and the fact was wrong so I went and changed it. Scary tho that Amazon defaults....
I'm completely down on Wikipedia now-a-days. I used to support them, until I found all the crappy political things they do. For one, I believe everyone should own their own Wiki story. I don't care if you don't like them, and go ahead and have an anti-XXX page that is linked to person XXX's page. For better or worse, everyone should own their own story. Now-a-days, I look up definitions on the Merriam-Webster page. Though Wiki was very very good for very technical issues, which seemed to be written by grad-students.
They are written by ANYBODY. I stick to what I know--book and library history. The few times I've strayed there are often watchers who flag anything they don't like. I tried to add a few baseball items and they were deleted. It can be a very difficult platform. I mostly add bibliographic citations.Sometimes I correct grammar or spelling. I do like to add pictures by uploading to Wikipedia commons and then use them in articles (mostly libraries). You can use it for a few things but certainly not things that are political. I've not got even 5K edits and there are people with hundreds of thousands. These are people who, that's all they do. You can't compete but in a narrow area you know well.
All true, but don't forget to also point the finger at where it belongs: us, the idiotic American population, who gravitate away from reading into watching more and more every year, in a million different ways.
This seems strange, because - as an actual example from my life - Youtube instructional videos have made me far more capable of handling repairs and real-life agricultural projects than I ever could through reading.
This is a very good observation. I look at a lot of radio sites and the people who post YouTubes share their expertise. And also most instruction manuals are free online.
I super hate video, but even I have had to admit that when it comes to DIY home repair stuff, you’re much better off with a video than a direly-written article broken up with 100 animated ads.
But that’s niche, for me. No way that I can watch political discussion in the volume that I can read it.
I don't recognize the crisis. I will not live long enough to read all the really great stuff that was written BEFORE I WAS BORN. If modern writing is crap, I don't care very much. It's not the most obvious clue our culture is circling the drain.
I say this in all sincerity--take a look at the Notable Books lists of the American Library Association. I served on the Committee for a number of years. We read 100s of books and the 26 we choose each year are for sure bought by libraries. https://rusaupdate.org/awards/notable-books-list/
I see a parallel between the writer/twitter writer and the incisive comedian vs. the one liner king. Both are fine, but let’s not pretend the one liner guy has any intellectual heft.
BTW are you Irish? I chuckled at your pseudonym
It simply cannot be understated how vile twitter is and how quickly it zombifies its daily users without exception.
It's rare a piece had resonated with me quite as much as this. It took nearly 11 years of scraping by paycheck to paycheck, flat broke in NYC, and getting fired from the YouTube content farm of a major legacy publisher most people only dream of working for before I could finally admit majoring in English lit was a mistake. Fuck them and fuck the whole system. You can just walk away and do something else with your life. The workplace will be less toxic and you'll get paid better too.
I really only regret not pulling the plug sooner. It's hard to admit you royally fucked up and threw a decade of your short life in the trash with absolutely nothing to show for it, but ignoring it won't make it go away.
As Freddie points out, writers have options beyond the media content farms. There's good money to be made copywriting and ghostwriting, and, in a way, it's more honest than working for Gawker or Buzzfeed. It lets me make a decent living without debasing myself kissing the backsides of media wankers I can't stand.
I make no such concessions. It was a mistake, full stop. I should have either been an engineer like my old man (and frankly, everyone spent my teen years trying to get me into the saddle) or an accountant like I am now.
The only value I gleaned from it was the wealth of literature and philosophy I was exposed to. That's not nothing, but it should have just been electives. There are far easier and better ways to make a buck. I've worked in construction for 5+ years now and the people here are actually a lot easier to get along with. People look at me like I'm crazy when I say the media was much more toxic workplace.
I did "do something else with my life," during the 2010s, but I regret that while "doing something else" I was on twitter daily for years, hoping that my Medium would get noticed if I shared the right post at the right time. Anyway, I related to what Freddie says here because he's talking about the appeal of the scene... to me, I'd say the sense of a scene made it easy for me to invest a lot of energy that I do think would have been better spent on exploring other career options and also on just hanging out. I thought I was working on a side hustle but I was actually just clinging to an online space where my English major felt more validated than it did in the material world.
Benny, the median age that people decide to become a librarian is 35. And most of us are English majors. I will gladly tell you more if you want to write to me direct.
I might take you up on that!! Thanks! :)
And I am kind of old fashioned as I started as a librarian and still call myself that, but today's grads are calling themselves digital humanities now and academic library jobs are quite varied. I used to teach at a library school but now I teach at a "School of Information." You would be surprised. I would be rich beyond Jeff Bezos if I had $1.00 for every person who likes to write or read who said to me, "why didn't I think of this sooner?" (well, maybe a little exaggeration.)
There were cybrarians in hospitals circa 1994. I used one to find a cheaper surgical procedure, & incidentally got an incompetent surgeon dismissed by finding current procedures he wouldn't entertain.
Saved about $16k.
I love that Kathleen is always prepared to dive into the trenches waving the librarian flag. Warms my heart.
I'd like to see the U.S. do what is done in Canada and the UK--the Public Lending Right where authors get payment for the circulation of their books in public libraries. That doesn't happen in the U.S. https://publiclendingright.ca/payments
> hoping that my Medium would get noticed if I shared the right post at the right time
This is Twitter right there. For 4 years of Trump, every journalist fantasized about posting That One Tweet that takes him down, and you can see the results.
I would have loved to get an English lit degree, or a degree in history, but I would have happily used them in my actual career, which was mostly product marketing.
How many great writers studied writing in college? How many great artists studied art in college?
And how many journalists in times past went to journalism school? “Kid, we can teach you to put the paper in the typewriter.”
Just had a flashback to Stuff White People Like. Back when the humor in white people criticizing other white people could come in a form like that... just deadpan and detailed descriptions of unusual behaviors that educated whites take for granted as "normal" in their friends, or in themselves.
How far white people criticizing other white people has declined by now... you had to sit down and actually intend to read a SWPL post, you couldn't just glance at it and see a trigger word and get the entire content of the post in 5 seconds. And SWPL posts actually used writing, as in, you know, descriptions of thoughts and actions in a sequence. It didn't just wink and nod at the audience and encourage us to go "Ah, you said a word that is clearly designed to be relatable to someone like me."
Anyway, even the weird internet niche of white people criticizing white people for being white people used to be so much better.
It was funny but also not as important as it is today. "Whiteness" wasn't viewed as some important sociological force. It was just kinds funny.
True. Whiteness was a word that writers used in different contexts, like most words, rather than the overloaded symbol it is today.
Well, I mean when Chappelle or someone like that made fun of white people, it was in the same way Gaffigan jokes about Hot Pockets. Whiteness was silly and kinda lame, but not the Big Bad.
Looking back at the SWPL posts, I don't think it dated very well or was very well written, I think the author struck gold but wasn't a very good miner. Still, I think FdB is a little off when he says:
"Stuff White People Like was an institution! Now lampooning other white people’s racial attitudes is like 90% of what college educated white people do, so there's nothing left to satirize."
The underlying gag on the site is 'American college educated middle class liberal culture is a thing and it's sometimes funny when you describe it neutrally like an anthropologist because people in that culture don't do a lot of self-reflection about it.' Really it's not making fun of 'white people' it's making fun of the people who in 2021 own copies of Anti-Racist Baby and use the term 'white people' a lot. That group includes lots of people who don't have white skin, though people who do are the majority. I think there is still plenty of room to satirize this culture, perhaps more than ever...
Yeah, I never thought of it as "criticizing" white people, it was lampooning a cultural niche (even if it was a very large and influential cultural niche).
For most for the last 20 years my workplace has been mostly Mexicans (at certain points I was the only non-Hispanic person), and it was only a few years ago we could all joke about, "Oh, that's what we'd expect white people to do," or, "Sounds like a Mexican people thing there" ("Why do Mexicans smell like fabric softener?" "I know, isn't it nice?" or "Why do white people get so excited about dishwashers? We use the dishwasher to store our Tupperware" or "Clearly Mexicans enjoy the Fourth of July more than white people do"). It was almost constant. But not anymore.
For a long time many of my employees (most, in fact, until recently) were LGBT. We didn't joke about that because for these people being LGBT was more or less like being left-handed, which doesn't provide a lot of opportunities for light-hearted kidding.
SWPL never clicked with me because, while it was cleverly written and the behaviors were keenly observed, they never felt like they described white people but simply everyone I knew who went to college, whether they were white or not. It described my friends or Asian or middle eastern descent as well as it nailed any white friends. Meanwhile there was very clearly a huge swath of working class flyover whites who would have scratched their heads at being told they loved Wes Anderson movies, aluminum water bottles and fixie bikes. The use of white to label a class and not an actual ethnicity always grated, and while it was lighthearted, I feel it was an influential step down the road to the stupid place we are today. For what it’s worth though, the site never aimed to be an enduring media institution, but was just the calling card of one savvy writer who used it as a launching pad to a successful TV comedy writing career.
Completely agree.
“The use of white to label a class and not an actual ethnicity always grated, and while it was lighthearted, I feel it was an influential step down the road to the stupid place we are today.”
Yes! Same here.
Yeah, I agree too. I remember one item in SWPL about apple-picking, and I had a “what do you mean WE, white man?” moment. I have always found apple-picking and similar activities to be completely stupid.
But I grew up in a working-class farm community where most kids I knew (including my brother and his friends) started picking vegetables at age 12 for much-needed cash—in other words, farm labor is labor, not fun, unless you’re Marie Antoinette dressing up as a shepherdess.
Googling that out of curiosity, it seems like his most recent work is as a writer and producer of the show Black-ish, which is certainly...something...
That was by design. The writer came to my college to give a talk (in hindsight I have no idea why) and he was pretty funny but at the end he said something that has resonated with me ever since: “You don’t have to be white to be white, you just have to be rich.”
That’s correct. There are at least 50 shades of white. There’s pigmentationally white, politically white, ideologically white, I hate you so you’re white, your group gets into too many colleges white, etc.
That honestly sounds like an above-average college talk!
That's pretty much an admission that privilege is about class, not skin color.
Well not exactly, his point was that the particular sociocultural milieu he was caricaturing was a class, not merely a skin color.
What does an editor at NYT earn per year, what did Bari Weiss give up: $400,000?
What does Brooks earn: $500,000NYT and an extra $500,000 for tv?
Weiss almost certainly made less in a flat dollar figure than Brooks, despite signing her contract like 20 years later, and typically for the Brookses and Friedmans and Krugmans there's some ancillary monetization, although I have no idea about the specifics. All in all I feel very confident in saying that Brooks simply has a far better deal than Weiss had, even though salaries are supposed to go up over time.
What constitutes the upper middle class that you reference $200k+ ?
What’s surprising to me is that for someone who’s at the top of the pay pyramid for an industry - that’s not a lot of money when you compare it to a lot of other white collar professions.
I agree 100%. I offered up those numbers because I thought they were low.
What professions make more than 500k? Unless you're talking about C-level execs.
MD specialist, big law lawyer, software developer, network security, financial analyst, financial adviser, management consultant, software sales, any kind of B2B sales, the list is pretty long.
“Can” make, not “typically” make. I work at a big tech company as a software engineer and very, very few make over 500k. 200s, 300s are more typical for mid-career people and a lot of people plateau there. At smaller companies, it’s much lower, you can look at salary surveys.
Not saying that’s not a lot of money either way, not saying it never happens (I’m not far from it this year), but reliable data says it is not typical.
Very true. I was thinking more folks in the top decile or quintile. And then you have RSUs and various bonuses and incentives and just general stock appreciation, etc. it’s rarely $500k in the form of $19,230.77 every two weeks (gross).
Yeah I mean to be fair you were comparing Brooks or even Weiss, who are both elites of some kind, not typical NYT reporters. And elite engineers do get that kind of money. But I was talking all-in, not just salary- salary rarely exceeds 200k below v high levels, the mid-career 200s and 300s are with RSUs and bonuses.
My boss for one and he isn’t C- Suite. At my company those people are bringing home 8 figures.
Tell me if this seems reasonable:
Manager 80-120k
Directors 120-170k
VP. 225-275k
???
Stating salaries for a kid from a decent state school with a non-basket weaving major* are heading toward $80k-$120k.
* accounting, nursing**, engineering, IT, computer science, etc.
** Google says a newly minted NYC nurse is making $90k
I tend to agree with the take that neither culture nor politics have meaningfully advanced after about 2009, only technology. So rather than “creating content,” we’re simply repackaging and cannibalizing the same material over and over, in ever more bite-sized and efficiently targeted chunks, with dramatically diminishing returns. The internet’s tendency to flatten everything towards a vast equilibrium seems to have largely overwhelmed its ability to inspire, at least in my particular milieu.
Suburban middle class culture has always been a wasteland
…to intellectuals.
i just finished re-reading The Intellectuals and the Masses by John Carey, a good look at this phenomenon, the intellectuals' disdain for middle class culture.
I'm nowhere close to an intellectual
You didn't let me finish.
...and butt heads.
I kid, I kid.
not to ET
That random Sopranos quote at the end! Nice
jfc that takedown of nuGawker. Freddie, remind me never to get on your bad side.
As someone who was a part of what was both affectionately and pejoratively called "indie lit" for almost a decade, it's been both interesting and a massive bummer to see the same thing happen in small independent publishers of fiction. If anyone wants to know more about this, I have a lot to say about it!
But I do remember distinctly how small presses that felt essential began to collapse inward because the single person who was doing everything by themselves (editing, layout, publishing, logistics, royalties, etc) folded because after 6 years of making less than 20k per year publishing novels (and, honestly, most of these people really did this as a labor of love, making less than probably a thousand dollars per year doing it), they just gave up on this second job that never paid them in anything but facebook likes and twitter follows.
The ones that remained either got enormously lucky or had a lot of independent money (Maybe no one remembers Scott McClanahan anymore, but he was a rockstar in the small press world, and he may not have even been known at all had eccentric millionaire Giancarlo DiTrapano not enjoyed being publishing books most people wouldn't). But part of the collapse was that most of the darlings of the small press world who talked endlessly about the online writing community jumped ship to traditional publishing the moment they had a chance (which was definitely the right career decision for people like Roxane Gay, who would maybe still be writing traumatic short stories about rape and awkward romance had her nonfiction not hit so well with readers).
But, for me, the moment it began to die was when I noticed how most of the writers I knew didn't really write or read anymore. They mostly became aspiring political pundits.
I noticed the shift to aspiring pundits among people like me, aka people who majored in English and then graduated to having very well-maintained twitters and hoping to get a hipper job one day. I feel like it coincided with writing feeling more and more like gambling - if you're an unknown writer trying to break in, or a writer who's hit a plateau trying to rise, why not just lean into politics like everyone else? It's not unfun to write about, it's not uncreative, and it's not the most difficult topic to write a sentence about. It'll increase your odds of getting seen, so why not?
Yeah, I mean, I have no problem with that in general.
I think the reason it bothered me was partly because they were such bad pundits. Basically just rewriting whatever Chris Hayes or Rachel Maddow's latest hot take was. The other part was that it really did just seem like most of them stopped reading or writing books and were instead spending all day on facebook or twitter, posting literally dozens of times per day, if not hour.
And the biggest reason why this probably bothers me so much is that I knew these people and cared a whole lot about books.
Aspirational political punditry is pretty undemanding work, no?
For journalists, writing a daily column is a hell of a lot easier than researching and reporting.
Yeah. As an aspiration to invest in, it has low overhead.
Do you remember before Internet-- Len Fulton, Dust Books, COSMEP?
I'm a post-internet baby, so those are before my time.
Fulton edited the Small Press Review and also tried to annually identify all small press books. It was a huge national wonderful project. He died in 2011. COSMEP was the Committee on Small Press Editors and Publishers. Dust Books was the review of them. These were magazines (not zines) that were often done on printing presses. Here is a tribute to Fulton that gives an overview..and this was all by USPS... https://kawisniewski.com/2015/07/01/tribute-small-press-review/
I think many people would consider the presses I'm talking about to be "micropresses" now. I'm not sure they got captured by COSMEP, though they may have if the publishers wanted to be included.
I find a lot of independent publishing was really about how much money you had before you started. There's a lot of pay to play, unless you're already enmeshed in the university system. AWP was the big trade show we all went to and I know for a fact that it was almost never worth the expense for, like, 70% of publishers. But how much you paid for your table did have a big impact on how well you did at AWP.
The biggest success story out of indie lit is most definitely Two Dollar Radio, whose books regularly get coverage in all the big publications where it matters. Roxane Gay is probably the most successful of the individual writers, though Stephen Graham Jones is really hitting big these days. Matt Bell's most recent book is pushing him up beyond the limits of small press publishing too. A few others have seemed to make career transitions into Hollywood to varying degrees of success too.
I think a history of small presses/ micropresses would be fascinating. I think UC-Irvine has the back records of the small press review. And who will archive the more recent?
If you want data on public library fiction circulation which is one measure of reading let me know.
I do not want to drive everyone here crazy with data but the August 2021 report on public library use shows 2.2 billion items circulated in 2019. These national reports produced by the U.S. Institute of Museums & Library Services are compiled by each state submitting a report. There are lots of tables and here is a brief overview report in pdf: Characteristics of Public Libraries in the United States:
Results from the FY 2019 Public Libraries Survey https://www.imls.gov/sites/default/files/2021-08/fy19-pls-results.pdf
is that more or less than 10 years ago?
It's more but maybe because there are more people..and maybe better stats kept.
Whenever I see these soulless content farms, nü-Gawker and the like, pumping out standardized, assembly-line takes, my mind wanders to what those nerds over at OpenAI are working on. I see no reason even a modern AI, with a properly trained model, managed by someone who understands how to feed an AI contextual metadata, could not do most of the work of writing a Gawker essay on a topic.
You couldn't pull the human out of the loop quite yet. They'd still have to manage and prod the easily-distracted beast. Cut tangents short. Fill in prompts to poke and prod it in the desired direction. Sometimes take the reins, give it a sentence or two, then have it riff. Make sure it does not hew so closely to chunks of training data that it crosses into plagiarism. Right now, it's still a better business decision to make underpaid lit majors do the work. An AI-written nü-Gawker piece would be a gimmick, not a business plan. But there are no technical obstacles between us and prolefeed, only the fact that AI is still young and meat brains remain a cheap and plentiful resource.
"..Ask Jesse Singal the writer how much more Jesse Singal the podcaster makes." But Jesse Singal the podcaster wouldn't have an audience for the podcast if he hadn't been a good writer first and I think part of why the podcast is successful because it's a way to merge the voices of two good writers, plus their funny schtick about Katie being the boss.
The Quick Fix is great!
The issue with media jobs is simple, but no one wants to absorb it. Paglia nailed it long ago with Vamps and Tramps.
There is no heat. Bc the truth is being denied.
You can't be edgy anymore with Yay trans! The heat is now sadly: Men aren't women.
You can't be edgy anymore with Trump Bad! The heat is now sadly: Trump was fine.
Rage Against the unVaxxed is freezing fucking cold.
And there will be no civil war, bc the red states and rural areas will shut down food and trucking for blue areas and the will be starved out in days. THIS IS REALITY. Media has to ACCEPT REALITY. Underlying all this is force. Is brawn. is property rights. Is talent. Is biology. In the mind / body duality, the body wins.
We have to get back to feeble wonkie beta cucks feeling bad about themselves, while men kick sand in their faces for media to really work. Bc REALITY cannot be denied.
Media cannot alter reality, It can only hold a mirror up to it. Media right now continues to be a marxist distorted mirror, so like ALL MARXISM is fails to feed as many as it could.
Sci-fi has been shit for years, bc the hero's libertarian man against society frame isn't there to woo the boys who need to read it.
Look folks, men aren't women and Trump was fine SHOULD NOT BE HEAT, it's obvious and common. It is the REALITY we are all born into like chains. The academic effort to invert reality is a failure. Hunter Thompson worked bc even while he raged at Nixon, he did so surrounded by guns, drugs, roaring engines, and explosions.
USA#1!!! is REQUIRED as a baseline to invite Department Store sized audiences.
Heat is masculine. There is nothing toxic in it. Fat women aren't healthy and beautiful. Its hard to work out every day and not stuff your head with twinkies.
And Paglia was right, Apollonian art signifies an ascending culture and Dionysian art is proof you are dying.
Freddie - I'd like to see a piece on Don't Look Up winning, bc it failed to actually be about Climate Change. It's a hilarious dark comedy and the formula is simple. Trump voters all love it.
People who worry about irony
Red and rural areas won’t shut down trucking because 1) money and 2) nobody cares that much. This is why American politics is so ridiculous, why the raging fights are about obscure things that don’t matter to actual life: life isn’t that bad for most Americans. I guess that means we’re fat and happy Romans?
The civil war fantasies are bizarre. If the thought is even worth entertaining (which it probably isn't), a US civil war would probably involve other countries joining one the sides. It would probably end up like the Syrian Civil war with several factions that each have international backing. That or both sides would just immediately nuke each other until only Alaska and Hawaii remain.
But which countries would back Cap and which would back Iron Man? Tough to say.
It's not a fantasy. I do not expect a civil war. Because the blue team will be dead b4 it starts.
YOURS is the fantasy, bc you don;'t want to say "only the home team would survive a civil war"
And that KILLS ART!
You are already the weaker team, why kill off your artistic endeavors by denying it???
As is comedy, right?!
Asked and answered.
REALITY is one team has 500M guns, total loyalty of cops and soldiers... the other is your team
This is what Im talking about.
YOU as a person, the left, and "media" in general is BETTER OFF when you Fear & Loathe.
YES, you are trapped in here with a nation of boo-rah used car salesmen, YES, you have something to rage against.
The mental denial of Property rights = force and the "govt" is always really on the side of the value creators (think top half of population in each of the many states) just leads to "artists" having nothing to be rebel against.
Victims do not make the rules. QED.
If you are screaming you are oppressed, you are by definition NOT IN CHARGE.
If you mentally lash out at this and insist your team can win a land war with when the other team fills the military and acquires weaponry as insurance to make sure you are NEVER IN CHARGE, all you are doing is losing the ability to MAKE ART.
I hope this sinks in: REALITY is you are weaker visiting team and thats NEVER going to change. Nature is short and brutish. Violence and force underlies everything and you are terrible at those. MLK, Chomsky, Gandhi preach peace bc they get slaughtered iff they take up arms.
What does change is whether you admit it. If you admit it, you can make art! If you deny it, you can only make marxist propaganda. These are not the same thing. Che t-shirts doesn't pay as well.
Media can only be the mirror. If it distorts reality, less people use the mirror. Thats it.
I cannot believe this needs said AGAIN
There is no fight. Reality is no fighting happens bc one side wins.
My entire point here is that MEDIA THATS ADMITS THIS FACT, creates the room for art
Media that pretends there are enough tough leftists who do violence well.... which is a naive lie, makes art all but impossible.
Chomsky warning the left, don't act tough, they want us to act tough , bc it justifies their use of violence to end us is unblinking truth.
And no Texas gun shooting lefty asserts anything other than Chomsky.
Art needs to feel oppressed. Media needs to transmit the oppression honestly. The oppression is real. Talent and money (yesterday's talent) is always in charge. See Texas.
I like writers. But writers are never in charge. They eat better when they know it.
I am trying to figure out how to do this - MW is someone that requires a bit of special treatment. I don't know how else to put it.
*looks around* are you talking to me specifically? Very little of your description of the “you” in this comment matches me in any way.
"You" = the avg Freddie reader (who still skew left)
If it helps, we're about to redo the 1980s.
Trump = Nixon
Biden = Carter
DeSantis = Reagan (young voters are all learning again, just like Boomers, WHY you don't let Carter be POTUS)
CA, IL, NY have lost.
TX and FL have won.
I want "you" to not feel "bad" about this reality.
The artsy crowd is supposed to be outside looking in. Bc the "home team" can still enjoy art! They don't mind being critiqued/criticized - part of being a man is admitting the bad about the reality you enforce.
There are only tradeoffs in reality. Art doesn't understand tradeoffs. BUT media must understand and admit them.
Everything was downhill for media types when they decided to stop just reporting "both sides" - bc they lost half their readers, and were no longer "enforcing" reality artists rebel against.
Well, bud, I doubt our politics are very similar but I think your re-doing the 80s idea is interesting.
Paglia is another treasure who probably won't be around for a lot longer.
In the last American civil war the losers were on the rural agricultural side, not the industrial side, but they thought the same thing as you going in.
JFC. Just stop. The beat cuck writer crowd will be BROKEN IN HALF, thats why there will be no civil war. 500M guns + cops and soldiers = vote trump. Please stop, I'm trying to HELP "YOU" MAKE MONEY.
Denying reality doesn't make valuable media.
Valuable media doesn't talk about justice or what what ought to be, it talks about WHAT IS - it is unflinching in stating both sides.
Art can complain and make bank.
Media to make the most it can make, must be "objective" in the grand old way that leftists hate.
History is same!
1619 isn't reality, it's an effort to deny reality.
And it simply makes history a less valuable endeavor.
Do writers want to eat or not?
Easy there Rambo you misspelled beta cuck.
I went to a small liberal arts college in 2002, majoring in English lit. I wanted to be a journalist, but we didn't have a journalism major. And I didn't just want to be any journalist - I wanted to be an editorial writer for the New York Times.
But after one journalism class, and seeing how many accident stories and crime stories I would have to slog through in an attempt to "make it," I decided that wasn't for me. I had about the same chances of playing pro football as I did at being a nationally-known journalist.
I started a blog in 2003 because I loved to write. I still do. But I never expected my blogging to turn into a paid career.
I think most people on Substack, if they make anything at all, make money like the average person on Etsy: just a little bit extra to have fun with.
The lie behind the "long tail" was that things on the long tail actually make enough money to be financially successful. Most do not.
But there will always be people writing for the love of it, like the passionate editors of Wikipedia to whom Google, Apple, etc have outsourced the work of defining what is true and what is false.
Now I work for an online college. The closest I get to writing professionally is revising grants or editing courses. And I'm fine with that.
I think articles like this one serve as a good reality check for people who still think journalism is a smart career choice. But are there really many people like that left? The writing was already on the wall back in the early 2000s.
You are right abt Wikipedia. It's place where you can do much good and use these skills and maybe correct facts. I was surprised when someone used an "Alexa" in my presence and the device said,"According to Wikipedia....." and the fact was wrong so I went and changed it. Scary tho that Amazon defaults....
I'm completely down on Wikipedia now-a-days. I used to support them, until I found all the crappy political things they do. For one, I believe everyone should own their own Wiki story. I don't care if you don't like them, and go ahead and have an anti-XXX page that is linked to person XXX's page. For better or worse, everyone should own their own story. Now-a-days, I look up definitions on the Merriam-Webster page. Though Wiki was very very good for very technical issues, which seemed to be written by grad-students.
They are written by ANYBODY. I stick to what I know--book and library history. The few times I've strayed there are often watchers who flag anything they don't like. I tried to add a few baseball items and they were deleted. It can be a very difficult platform. I mostly add bibliographic citations.Sometimes I correct grammar or spelling. I do like to add pictures by uploading to Wikipedia commons and then use them in articles (mostly libraries). You can use it for a few things but certainly not things that are political. I've not got even 5K edits and there are people with hundreds of thousands. These are people who, that's all they do. You can't compete but in a narrow area you know well.
All true, but don't forget to also point the finger at where it belongs: us, the idiotic American population, who gravitate away from reading into watching more and more every year, in a million different ways.
This seems strange, because - as an actual example from my life - Youtube instructional videos have made me far more capable of handling repairs and real-life agricultural projects than I ever could through reading.
This is a very good observation. I look at a lot of radio sites and the people who post YouTubes share their expertise. And also most instruction manuals are free online.
I super hate video, but even I have had to admit that when it comes to DIY home repair stuff, you’re much better off with a video than a direly-written article broken up with 100 animated ads.
But that’s niche, for me. No way that I can watch political discussion in the volume that I can read it.
Glenn, people read a lot we just do not hear much about it in the social media.Libraries have long wait lists for books. Do not despair.